May 8, 2018

Ohio populists for Kucinich, and other primary discussion

If you're a populist in Ohio and are frustrated by the GOP refusing to follow the populist demands of their own primary voters from 2016, and instead running their standard slate of corporate elite Establishment types and Tea Party crazies -- you don't have to waste your vote on any of them in today's primary.

It's all the more galling since Trump himself intervened in the selection of the state GOP chair in January 2017, supposedly to elevate the populist-nationalist wing and kick out the corporate globalist Kasich wing. Well, over a year later, you wouldn't know the difference -- same candidates on offer as if the Kasich machine were still in charge. The party absolutely refuses to adapt to the demands of its own voters.

Meanwhile there's a real populist in the Democrat primary, Kucinich for governor. Ohio has open primaries, so anyone can vote for him.

Aside from being populist domestically (like favoring Medicare to cover everybody), Kucinich is a trade hawk and anti-interventionist on foreign policy, like the old Trump campaign, for which he was a quasi-surrogate on Fox Business. He wanted Bernie to win the primary, but once Crooked Hillary rigged the nomination, he said it's sad to say, but Trump is running better on trade and foreign policy than the Democrat.

He's not a hardliner on immigration per se, but his economic populism would eliminate immigration indirectly -- since the only reason immigrants come here is to meet American employers' demand for cheap labor.

Raise the minimum wage to $15, cheap labor becomes illegal, employers decide that if they have to pay a decent wage they might as well hire a good American rather than an immigrant, and immigrants return home when they can't get hired under the higher minimum wage.

That approach to draining the immigration swamp will not only stand a better chance with general election voters, it will target the true underlying source of immigration -- greedy employers' demand for cheap labor -- rather than superficial symptoms like the immigrants themselves. If you deport immigrants without blocking the employers' demand for cheap labor, they'll come right back at the behest of the employer class -- whose GOP puppets will refuse to build a wall or whatever else, lest that block the supply of cheap labor.

Enough of the do-nothing Republicans. It's time to support a real change agent like Kucinich for governor.

(Feel free to use the comments for remarks about other primary races today, like West Virginia, or primary season in general.)

I just heard about the West Virginia Republican race a couple days ago... How bad is it in the Republican party that the coal baron who got nearly two dozen workers killed because he flouted worker regulations is "the populist"?!?So, I was curious to see if his opponents challenged him on his populist credentials...

Nope. Neither them or their supporters. One threatened lawfare against Coal Baron though.

I like Manchin a lot and can't imagine anything he's done to not deserve a second term. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope the coal baron wins, lol!

Kuicinich had a resurgence in the mid-2000s, when the crime rate briefly rose. That he is now resurfacing is perhaps more evidence that the culture is beginning to become more outgoing - and that people are preferring more sincerity.